


a fever, and a burden

by lisewrites



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, F/F, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Minor Character Death, Rebecca AU, Soft Lena Luthor, but mentioned, it's the sad landowner au i can't live without, never explicit or described
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:40:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22106449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lisewrites/pseuds/lisewrites
Summary: “I’m not sure that I know what you mean. I wasn’t aware that one could buy companionship, especially from a girl such as yourself.”OR“I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love.”
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	a fever, and a burden

**Author's Note:**

> “I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love.”
> 
> I have finally come to terms with the fact that if I want to read a DuMaurier’s Rebecca au, I have to actually write it. And so that’s what I’m doing. I posted the most of this chapter’s last section on here before, but it’s been changed and somewhat re-written. For anyone who’s already read it, welcome back. Let me know if you would like more. Or im on tumblr now at hellolise

She is aware, somehow conscious, that she is dreaming.  
In life, she is certain that she could never move so lightly, the white shingles of the beach hardly shifting below her feet. Yet she didn’t float, waif-like, towards the water. The shingles slid slightly under her step, little stone-cold white bodies shifting against one another uselessly, almost silently.  
Even the stones here make love.  
She doesn’t dream often. Not now. Not anymore.  
In her dream, as it had been so often in life, the water of the sea is perfectly smooth. Yet unnaturally mirrored now. As though nothing is now hiding under its glistening surface, no hidden heaving mass of currents and tides and lies. Just the moonlight glancing off its face and straight back towards her.  
She steps into the water, simultaneously knowing that her feet are bare and feeling absolutely nothing at all. The water is not freezing, as it had always been in the past, even in the depths of summer. She is certain that the sea would never cut through her like that again. No weeds creeping against her ankles, brushing at her feet. Stroking hands, ready to grab at the slightest provocation. The Atlantic Ocean now was nothing more than a lukewarm bath, tested time and time again against a careful mother’s wrist. Empty and still for her to bathe in. She would swim, for now, just as she had never dared to before. She would swim out into the bay, and out further, past its sheltered confines. Out into the sea, and then the ocean, unafraid, until she alone would either find America or lose her breath.  
Breathless, she would float on her back, as naked as the day she were born.  
She allows her eyes to drift shut, and thinks of her love. 

And nothing will come between them again, of that she is certain.  
Consciousness comes to her, as it has always done, in a sudden rush of awareness. Where once she might have stiffened, all too alert, taught, tight, tense, ready to swim for her life, she is now calm. She melts back into the sheets, and pauses for a moment to feel. A hand on her chest, a light breath against her shoulder. Soft curves pressed to her side. The watered-down morning light, creeping through the curtains. Their rooms overlook the park, but distantly she can hear the city a din, already racing, full-throttle, into the morning.  
Beside her, half-atop her, Lena shifts.  
Nothing will come between them. There is no expanse of pristine white sheets between their bodies as they sleep. Not now. Sometimes there is barely even a hair’s breadth. Just skin keeping their souls apart.  
Or one day, maybe, another sleeping body between them. A mop of curling soft hair. Little cold feet pressing against their warm stomachs. Finally sleeping, for now, after climbing into bed with them in the dim hours of the morning. Or maybe restless, for both their mothers had never slept well. A hereditary restlessness, passed not through blood but in the love spilled between them.  
She had read that the city’s orphanages were spilling over.  
She feels that she is spilling-over, over-spilling, absolutely overcome with love. Maybe one child would not be able to contain all the love she has. When she wakes, she’ll ask Lena about two. Or maybe three. Chasing each other up and down and up and down the stairs of the little sanctuary they had created for themselves here, just above the bustle of the city. She presses a kiss against Lena’s forehead, wet, hot, and feels her arch against her, somehow closer now.  
Now that sleep no longer separates the two of them. 

\- three years earlier - 

Monte Carlo glistens. And Kara Danvers has never really touched a shiny thing before. She runs her fingertips across the metal railing of her hotel room’s little Juliette balcony. The daytime heat has blistered the white paint, leaving it flaking away against her skin. She blinks, looking down, as she rubs her fingertips together. The paint flecks drop away to the balcony below, like the ash from a cigarette.  
She has never smoked a cigarette.  
But that’s low, low down on her list of things that she, at barely twenty-three, as never done.  
And now, five floors up, in a bedroom overlooking the harbour, Kara looks back towards the sea. It shines, unsettling, unquiet. Lights from a thousand boats dance across the placid water, and she distantly yet distinctly hears a cork fly from a bottle of champagne.  
Pop.  
Cheers follow, tinkling laughter drifting towards her on the cool night air, above the noise of the waves floating against the hulls of the yachts.  
Nothing is ever cold in midsummer Monte Carlo.  
Kara will spend another fortnight in this mild limbo. And then? Her life stretches out before her, fading into a dull horizon. Back to New York, to sit beside her benefactor at coffee mornings and and elevenses and brunches and light lunches and afternoon teas and formal dinners and after-dinner drinks and intimate suppers. Her days constructed of a dozen meals, punctuated with trips in the limousine, and poker, and bridge. Each one would be exactly the same as the last. And then, when she had improved and the time was right, there would be her marriage.She, Kara Danvers, was an investment piece.  
She picks at more of the white paint, scraping at it with the blunt of her nail.  
She oughtn’t do that.  
She ought to go to bed. She will be needed before breakfast. Ms Grant liked to wake early and rise late, spending a significant portion of her morning propped up on pillows applying powder to her cheeks and discussing the other occupants of the hotel with a silent Kara.  
So, she ought to go to bed.  
She doesn’t move. 

Distantly, she hears the wheels of a car change in pitch, from the low hum against the tarmac harbour-front thoroughfare, to the higher-pitched scrunch of the gravelled driveway to the hotel. There’s a flash of headlights, and a car pulls in to the hotel forecourt five floors below her, swinging confidently into the space beside the fountain. An off-cream Jaguar, with its fabric roof folded all the way down. Off-cream, just like everything else in this city. Classic, in a cooly anonymous fashion. A film star’s car.  
And that’s good, because Kara doesn’t know a damn thing about film stars.  
Yet she can already feel the drip and throb of her own embarrassment as she imagines how Ms Grant will seize upon this moviestarhollywoodheartthrob at breakfast the next morning. How she will flush, how she will simper, how she will drop “perhaps you know my son, he visits Los Angeles often” into the conversation-  
The engine cuts off. And for a cool moment Kara thinks that the car is somehow, miraculously, unoccupied. As she peers through the darkness, Kara imagines that she can see drops of water from the fountain pummelling against the car’s slim windscreen. And then there’s a slight movement. A furtive movement. Kara has a sudden swooping rush in the pit of her stomach, as though something truly dreadful were about to happen, something violent, something-

Something that will, for better or for worse, alter the trajectory of the rest of her life. 

And there’s a flash of light.  
The peeling paint of the Juliette balcony under her palms suddenly feels sticky.  
The sole occupant of the Jaguar is lighting up a cigarette, as another cheer pours over from the harbour. Kara sees a shift in the shades of darkness within the car.  
There’s a moment of silence.  
The occupant of the car takes a long drag from the cigarette. Kara watches the burning end move through the darkness.  
And then the front door to the hotel is opening, and pouring orangish lamplight over the gravel, silhouetting the young valet in his red and red and red and red and red suit as he skips down the front steps. He already has one hand behind his back, his white gloves almost glowing in the hot Mediterranean darkness, yet is still over ten feet away from the vehicle when he recoils.  
“Veuillez m’excuser, madame.”  
His voice is so soft Kara can barely catch the words. His chin is lowered, tucked against his high collar, as though he is directing his words to the highly polished buttons running down the front of his red jacket. He performs a funny little half-bow as his feet do a strange tapping motion, and then the gravel scrunches under the balls of his feet as he turns a direct one-hundred-and-eighty degrees. He hurries back into the foyer of the hotel, the door swinging shut behind his retreating figure. 

And then, it is silent once more.  
And all the time the valet has performed this oddly choreographed solo dance routine, the figure in the car has been perfectly still.  
Kara feels hot about her cheeks, as though she had just witnessed something intensely private. A flurry of movement saved for someone else’s eyes. Furtive, somehow, and in a way that she does not yet understand; dirty. She images the valet must feel the same creep of embarrassment. The valet and his shining buttons and his fast feet, and Kara and her sticky palms and her chipping paint and her Juliette balcony. They were not so different, the two of them.  
The woman in the car below might as well come from another world entirely. 

There’s the space of another heartbeat, and then Kara watches as she, for she was a she, the valet had quite plainly said madame, takes another long drag of her cigarette. Through the darkness, Kara can now almost make out a head of dark hair, and the sharp angle of a jawline. Her hand was pale, resting against the car door, flicking her ash towards her own reflection in the wingmirror. It was funny, Kara noticed, that the lady, the madame, was trailing the cigarette not between her middle and index fingers, but between her index finger and her thumb. There was something almost boyish about the movement.  
Childlike?  
The angle of that sharp jawline changes a little.  
Kara can see a new shape of shadow tossed down the woman’s neck.  
There’s so much silence, squeezed here between the sea and the hills. A buzzing sort of silence, a new breed of quiet punctuated by shouts and a hum of conversation, but a silence nonetheless.  
There is nothing in the entire city, or on the entire riviera. Nothing but herself, and the cool sea air lapping against her bare calves, and the woman sitting in the car on the forecourt below her.

She smokes four cigarettes in fast succession, barely breathing between drags. Kara counts the butts as she tosses them to the gravel at the side of her car. One. Two. Three. As the fourth falls, Kara has a sudden, odd impulse to fly down all fives flights of stairs in her nothing but nightdress simply to pick up a stranger’s cigarette butts. She imagines herself, barefoot and dressed all in a thin white cotton, a cheap white cotton, racing across the gravel to kneel beside a stranger’s car door.  
Kneeling, looking up at a woman no longer cloaked in darkness.  
Oh, the scene it would create, and the valet laughing at her in his red red red suit. The thought alone drives a hot blush up, up, and across her collarbones.  
She shakes her limp blonde hair out of her face.  
She is simply tired, and she ought to go to bed.  
Kara watches as the car door opens slowly.  
As she stands, Kara realises the woman is dressed entirely in black.  
A well-cut but simple black dress, a day dress, worn with neither hat nor gloves. Her hair is nearly as dark as her dress.  
Decidedly not like a film star.  
There is a something of a hunch to her back, a hint of the slightest stoop in her shoulders. Not a stoop of age, Kara can hear her steps as she crosses the gravel, and her footsteps are sure and light. Not a stoop of age, but a stoop nonetheless. Fatigue perhaps.  
She is halfway across the forecourt now. Kara is only vaguely aware that she is holding her breath.  
Look up, look up, look up, look up look up look up look up look up look up.  
The lady, the woman, the stranger, the madame, does not look up.  
A brief slice of the foyer’s lamplight simply flickers across the forecourt as she opens the front door of the hotel.  
And she, Kara, she ought to go to bed.

***

As she wakes the next morning, she feels oddly spent, as though staring at a stranger from a balcony above were somehow hard labour. There is a decided ache to the bottom of her rib cage which seems to drop lower as the one corner of slightly peeling wallpaper on her ceiling drifts lazily in and out of focus. The light spilling in from the french doors to her balcony already blanching the wall above her bed.  
She wills herself to not fall back asleep, and concentrates instead on the task at hand. And the task at hand was getting through breakfast without stuttering in front of the hard-faced waiter or spilling runny egg yolk down her new skirts.  
She prefers her eggs hard boiled anyway.  
The ache below her lungs only intensifies as she dresses. But some lingering tiredness remains, an uncomfortable twist somewhere behind her stomach. Deeper inside her, hot and pressing into the softness of her organs.  
The feeling remains, dully, as she watches Ms Grant liberally apply rouge to her already-ruddy cheeks. She feels as though she were looking at absolutely nothing at all. Ms Grant tells her about her plans for the day. Breakfast and then bridge and then elevenses and then a stroll and then lunch and then and then and then and then and then and then and then. Kara will have two hours free that afternoon. The lady in the car, the madame, had smoked four cigarettes, one after another. Maybe that afternoon she could take another tennis lesson.  
She is, after all, improving. 

The lift attendant stands a little too close to her on the seemingly endless journey down to the breakfast room. He had shiny buttons too. Like the valet. The wood panelling of the lift is also shiny, and Ms Grant is telling her some inane story about her son, and His Studies In America. A bell rings somewhere deeper inside the hotel. The lift attendant looks at her from the corner of his eyes. Kara looks back. He has extraordinarily long eyelashes. Yes, Ms Grant’s son is enjoying Michigan.  
Kara does not remember where Michigan is, nor is she sure if she ever knew.  
She is immensely relived when the shuddering of the lift grinds to a halt, and the metal grate is pulled back by a white glove.  
Yes, yes, yes, last night the valet had white gloves also. But the valet always had white gloves.  
Yes, yes, yes.  
Kara walks with her eyes downcast, thinking a little vaguely that the floral pattern of the carpet may match one of Ms Grant’s most obnoxious blouses. The print was not European, not even close; it was more easily matched to a English faux-stately home. Pinks and creams and greens and pinks. Of course, all the real houses of stature have floorboards and Persian rugs. Not this cheap imitation. Her heels sink into the fabric. The pattern is a stark contrast to its surroundings in this sun-bleached Mediterranean city. And then the carpet stops abruptly to give way to the oiled wooden floorboards of the breakfast room, and Kara raises her eyes to inevitably meet those of the intimidating waiter, already feeling her tongue begin to shake, ready to stutter over her order of hard-boiled eggs, and…  
And.  
Oh.  
Oh.  
She stops, dumbly, in the doorway. Ms Grant’s directly behind her, clutching her purse to her bosom and already opening her red-painted lips.  
“Come on child, what the devil-”  
There’s a lot of silence ringing around Kara’s brain as something hot and slow seems to slip away down the back of her throat. A foreign, new type of heat rises to her pink cheeks.  
She realises, to her own embarrassment, that she is blushing.  
And then there’s Ms Grant’s voice once again, ringing through her skull from some point right beside her left shoulder.  
“Good grief, that’s Lena Luthor!”


End file.
